The short but turbulent life of Programmatic digital advertising has enjoyed a vivid storyline – encompassing great success in the marketplace due to technical wizardry that opened up new opportunities: and by contrast, heavy criticism for bad execution and questionable selling in some quarters.
What is now becoming referred to as the ‘1st Generation’ of programmatic buying can now be reviewed to study its strengths and weaknesses, and the continuing growth in what are often called our ‘learnings’ or our ‘takeaways’ should allow us to structure new, more intelligent ways to use the computerised buying techniques. Is it therefore time to usher in Programmatic 2?
Meet the New Boss?
We have been seeing commentators announcing the arrival of ‘Programmatic 2.0’ since the start of 2014, so this may seem to be a case of déjà vu: but I have not been convinced by what others have claimed to be the dawn of a genuinely new era in digital media. Too often it’s involved the as-yet undelivered promise of programmatic buying across media such as TV and print, sponsored by worried media moguls – a case of ‘meet the new boss – same as the old boss’ (© Pete Townshend).
It is also suggested by researchers that using dull old Programmatic 1.0, the application of standardised adverts to different demographics gives hit-and-miss results. This seems instinctively true, from all that we have learned in traditional marketing. Just because you can retarget most people, it does not follow that they all respond equally to a given ad treatment. And even the conventional demographics of age, occupation, location, sex and social class are pretty broad-brush in their effectiveness for targeting purposes.
Do you go for the jugular or do you take a more touchy-feely approach? Apparently, when you are selling airline tickets or holidays, going in hard with headline offers and prices is the most effective route. Whereas if you are promoting a bank or insurance company, you should ease off on the hard sell. It reduces conversion rates. Get them comfortable with your brand first.
Personalisation needs Personalities
And the process of aligning brand and consumer is likely to get more sophisticated as data on web users, overlaid with 1st party CRM information, improves and we learn to measure customers’personality. Visual DNA in the US has researched this attribute and using the OCEAN model it has tested peoples’ reaction to different ad treatments.
OCEAN is an acronym (and you know how much researchers love those) that has been applied in academia for the last three decades or so. It stands for ‘core personality dimensions’ that are described as: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.
Now, you may well ask how anyone can analyse millions of people on such criteria from commercially available data, and this is where the reportage of the process gets a bit vague. We are simply told that online behavioural information is merged with normal demographics to supply “psychographic data”.
If you think that this sounds a bit like alchemy, then you may be right: possibly the dawn of Psychometric 2.0 is a way off yet…
Nevertheless, the tests are interesting.
They showed a full-on, 30-second video ad designed to secure engagement. The focus group members had each been psychometrically tested to assess whether they were extroverts or introverts. The reactions of viewers were captured on webcam by Realeyes, (an operation that offers real-time emotional measurements). The clear result was that extraverts loved the ad while introverts hated it.
A second test involved a real audience. An unnamed health and beauty brand bought 15 million programmatic impressions and then set out to divide this group between people that were somehow classified as being high openness, high extraversion: and low openness, low extraversion. The former received an ad instructing them to “Give two fingers to convention”. The latter were more softly informed that “Beauty doesn’t have to shout”. Some 1,000 customers purchased the product (not a huge conversion rate but we don’t know what the norm is for the brand), and ROI increased by 56% when compared to a control group. (Of course the cost of the analysis has to be taken into account).
Multiplication in Action
Neither of the above findings is revelatory but they do indicate the need for marketers to use their data intelligently, and you don’t necessarily need new and unproven technology to do that. According to a study by PaperG and Digiday Content Studio, 62 percent of brands already create and transmit multiple versions of their ads. So those who rail against the dinosaur of Programmatic 1.0 are perhaps protesting too much.
I am confident that the immutable laws of marketing will remain unchanged by the new capabilities that we are building. Know Your Customer is still the key rule, in both digital and analogue worlds: use every tool at your disposal to understand clients’ needs and then build rich content that will engage and please them enough to prompt initial and repeat purchases.
‘Simples’ – to quote one seemingly unlikely marketing success story.
By Colm Hannon, Founder and CEO of Hannon Digital.
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